


All the stories I ever told

by shelter



Category: Claymore
Genre: F/F, Implied Sexual Content, Lost Love, Multi, Open Relationships, POV Second Person, Romantic Friendship, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-18
Updated: 2016-06-18
Packaged: 2018-07-15 19:41:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7235935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shelter/pseuds/shelter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From trainee to one of the seven ghosts: Cynthia's life as a warrior, told through her relationships. (Spoilers up to chapter 147 of the manga)</p>
            </blockquote>





	All the stories I ever told

**All the stories I ever told**

(M for implied sexual content)

 

 **1.**  
Nusa was the first. You remember her from the days at the academy at Staff. During outdoor practice, Nusa would go on all fours and lap water from the lake. She looked like a doe: head lowered, reflected face wavering on the water, flanked by trees and rushes. Nusa always smiled. She was the first person who said she loved you.

* * *

 

 **2.**  
Lisbeth had a technique of her own. She would drag you behind some empty farm just so she could practice. Then she would want to make out. She said you would receive her black card if she fell. When she eventually did, it went to someone else.

* * *

 

 **3.**  
After the first successful Awakened Being Hunt, you remember applying field dressing to a combat wound Jean received. It had turned septic. You held her hand while burning the maggots off the cut with a stubby candle. Her lips were crushed and flaking, like a wet red arrow. They tasted like tea. She never smiled.

* * *

 

 **4**  
Naatje said she loved your legs. She had this habit of caressing your instep.

* * *

 

 

 **5.**  
Sometimes they told you things about themselves, things irrelevant beyond the walls of the mission or the hunt. Sometimes their stories sounded like fairy-tales, or wistful thoughts about what could be. Other times, they contained too much horror, too much pain. After what happened at Hantel, Jean talked only about the experience of awakening. Once, Naatje spoke about her grandmother. It was fall, and outside the window the skeletal branches of trees surrounded the house like a closing fist.

* * *

 

 **6.**  
The rooms at the safe house had pictures on the walls: faded watercolour scenes, portraits of stiff-faced families with packs of children. You slowly viewed them by candlelight. When you returned to your room, Natalie had undressed and was waiting by the window. She took the light from you and gently blew it out.

* * *

 

 **7.**  
Even in the presence of others, Ophelia liked to come from behind and un-tuck your faulds from your armour. She would press her hands down your waist, saying she loved blondes.

* * *

 

 **8.**  
Helen always helped with your hair. She did and undid the plaits, slowly ran her fingers through your locks. She could make braids and ponytails, spikes and faux hawks. She had a large forehead. She blushed when you touched her at the ridge at Alphonse. But when she was in the mood, she would whisper your name in the dark.

* * *

 

 **9.**  
For a long while Miria didn’t know anything. She trained and schooled you and the others, devoted time to make sure no one felt they were left behind. She never knew about Tabitha, or Helen and Deneve, or Clare. But when she did, things were not any different. If she was surprised, she didn’t show it. So you invited her to share your blanket during winter of the sixth year. You remember Tabitha squinting into the fire when Miria, after a long while, said yes. Underneath the covers, she was like any other warrior. After you finished, your remember how cold her feet were.

* * *

 

 **10.**  
You were with Pamela at the coast during the summer before Pieta. The waves roared and bullied the beach while the two of you ran and embraced the surf. Later, she stood at the headland, gazing out at islands like dollops of green in the sun. Wet sand ringed the hollows of her buttocks. You still miss the beach.

* * *

 

 **11.**  
Delia was the youngest. You only remember her because she kissed you under the curtains of a weeping willow at Musha.

* * *

 

 **12.**  
Like Delia, there were some that came with places. The endless sands at the coast near the cliffs of Doga was Pamela. You pictured Eva every time you passed the twisted rivers downstream of Mount Zakol. Galatea was under a statue of the maid at the convent in Rabona. The snowed-in graveyard at Pieta reminded you of Flora and a lock of her hair on your nose.

* * *

 

 **13.**  
After one Awakened Being hunt, you overslept at the safe house. The curtains were drawn so the rooms were as dark as a grotto despite it being all summer outside. Everyone had reported back to Staff, only you and Matilda were left. She said she felt hungry. Later, the two of you walked to the nearest down for a meal. She grasped your hand and held onto it all the way.

* * *

 

 **14.**  
Janna had delicate, birdlike hands. She was fresh out of the academy when you met her. She would tilt her head when talking, her so blue eyes looking at the world from an angle. She bled out in your arms after her first hunt.

* * *

 

 **15.**  
You spent those years with the Ghosts learning skills the others were expert at. From Miria, you learnt how to dodge and parry. Helen taught you how to ambush an enemy with a team, regardless of terrain. Tabitha helped hone your long-distance yoki detection. Your long hours with Clare helped polish your sword-fighting technique. In return you instructed them on the basics of trauma care on the battlefield, how to dress wounds and see if limbs needed amputation, and focus yoki into healing. It was a trade-off. It made you feel you were useful. It made sharing beds, blankets and bodies easier.

* * *

 

 **16.**  
Not everything was sweet. Sometimes two or three would force a warrior to give them what they wanted. Sometimes warriors carried their battles with them into bed. Then there was reputation. Some never showed any affection for fear of being taken less seriously. Others called you names - slut, bitch, demon, minx, jezebel, rake, broad - just because you’d been with someone they liked or loved.

* * *

 

 **17.**  
Saying no was part of life as a warrior. You drew lines you didn’t want to cross, things you preferred not to do. You didn’t refuse often, but you can remember the times when you did.

Some responded: “Come on. Don’t be a prude… why won’t you have some fun?”

Others said: “I have a right. I have a right to a good time after all that I’ve been through.”

And: “Why don’t you love me?”

Sometimes saying no meant more. It meant not mistaking urges for emotions, words for truth, bodies for lovers.

* * *

 

 **18.**  
Over two summers, it was all Eva. This was before she became a single-digit and went north. In the casual atmosphere after hunts she would have an arm around your shoulder. Other warriors asked you in private if you had finally taken a partner.

During another assignment at Mount Zakol, you and her camped by the wide, silt-flushed river on the mountain’s eastern flank. The midnight summer heat hung heavy on everyone’s shoulders, and insects screamed all night in the trees. When she decided she had enough, she stripped and went for a swim. She stood in on a sandbar near the bank and beckoned for you.

You followed, feeling free in the water. You swam against the current and crawled up behind her on the sandbar. You wanted to tackle her, but you ended up staring: a lone warrior against a thin darkness shot with stars. Starlight and pearls of river water drenched her ivory-white skin, defined the bars of her ribs.

“What?” she asked. “Why are you staring?”

Later, after her death, you heard that Isley of the North had his men shred her body into pieces so that there’d be no trace of her for anyone to mourn over.

* * *

 

 **19.**  
There were many warriors, some whom you can’t remember by name. Only by touch, or sensation. Or a finger on the your lips. Sometimes there were two, at the same time but in different situations. You never felt in need of affection. It was there. In her eyes or in her smile. You just needed to reach out and demand it. Take the initiative, be courageous, get what you want, fulfil the need. You could apply these principles to battle too.

* * *

 

 **20.**  
Clare always claimed she was not interested. But she did it anyway. She could be forceful, full of stamina and listless energy. She’d smile at you, and then in the passing of clouds over the moon, she’d warp that smile into a frown. You remember her tongue, like a salty slug, as you embraced in the undergrowth in the mountains overlooking Pieta. With you she never spoke about anyone else. After things were over she would leave the communal blanket, thinking you were asleep. She would stare at the hills, the moonlight casting a shadow over the divide of her loins.

* * *

 

 **21**.  
You believed in waiting. You loved not acting out a desire, holding out for someone else to make the first move. They would approach you blushing with a shy request, or boldly taking your hand and propositioning you there and then. This was the pleasant thrill of pursuit, like hunting, but with a better ending. They came with confident grins, over-eager curtsies, kissing your hand so all the other warriors whooped. You knew when you were being hunted by another warrior she’d do anything for you.

* * *

 

 **22.**  
Yuma liked silence: just sitting beside each other at a fire, her fingers curled into yours. She stroked your hair, the movement pressing her thigh closer to yours. She had saved your life once during an ambush gone wrong, but she never reminded you of it the way other warriors would. The others said she was like that. Quiet to a fault, a dreamer, a warrior of actions instead of bravado. She would lay her head on your shoulder, and fall asleep to your hand massaging hers.

* * *

 

 **23.**  
You were with Emelia on the journey to Pieta. It was the tail-end of summer, the trees turning into shades of gold and brown. Stopping overnight at a small stream outside a town, you spent the night with her in a vineyard.

Later, the two of you stole grapes under the cover of darkness. You had never tasted them before. She crushed them with her palm, mixing skin and pulp, and smeared them on your face as a joke. Juice from the grapes collected in a long stain on the front of your shirt. It looked a lot like blood.

* * *

 

 **24.**  
There was always a place to go, a place hidden for things that lay deep in your heart. There were abandoned farmhouses with straw beds. Sometimes, there were steps in caves, carved out by the wind. Or you would meet someone by a magnolia tree outside town, on a bridge, or at a lookout point where you could watch sunset in her arms. Galatea had her furnished quarters at the convent with goose-feather pillows and linen blankets. Even if it was down in the ferns, behind shrubs or in the shallows of a river, there was always a place. A place of warmth.

* * *

 

 **25.**  
Deneve was so polite, like a gentleman. She would tap your shoulder, clear her throat and nod to some dark place away from the others. She even excused herself from Helen’s presence once. She brought you just beyond the ferns at a mountain cave. It was so near to the others that you could still hear the ballad of their conversation. She asked if you were comfortable, before gently placing you under her. Pebbles dug into your back, but you never felt so pampered. She had warm strong hands.

* * *

 

 **26.**  
Over the years, you learnt to forget. You learnt to forgive. You learnt that there will always be another who wanted you, just as much you needed her.

* * *

 

 **27.**  
More than once, you asked if you overdid it. You wonder aloud in the dark if you were going too far, too fast. In the mornings, the world seemed too bright, filled with needles of painful sunshine. You would have trouble standing. Pain clenched your chest as if you had run too fast. It was like that until somebody held you by the hand or by both shoulders and said, it’s all right, Cynthia. It’s all right to want. It’s all right to love.

* * *

 

 **28.**  
At first when it was just the Ghosts, things were difficult. Movements were so restricted and the surroundings so hostile it seemed there was no way you could talk to anyone of them. Nobody was in the emotional state to start anything. There was also a chronic lack of privacy, and the constant moving from location to location, taking up sentry duty and hiding yoki. But you learnt that being forced together can be foreplay for intimacy. The rules for relationships change, and uncertainty made your time together more intense.

* * *

 

 **29.**  
In your last summer with Eva you danced with her in the rain. Lightning clawed through the sky and pellets of water rapped your head. For one fantastic moment she went down on one knee in a puddle of water. Your teammates began to cheer. Then she took you by the waist and did a waltz, twirling you by your right hand. You remember her muddy knees and the faint touch of her fingertips through water.

* * *

 

 **30**  
You understood that everyone belonged to everyone else. Nobody belonged solely to an individual. This meant you watched higher digits flirt with Eva and hold her against a wall as they kissed. This meant Tabitha would turn away when Deneve and Miria left together in the same direction after excusing themselves one after another. This meant Helen joked too loud and ate too much whenever Deneve and another of the Ghosts were not around. You bit your tongue when the warrior you liked was with someone else.

You understood that no one had an exclusive claim over a person. No one could treat another like she was their property.

Because that was how the Organisation worked.

* * *

 

 **31.**  
With Veronica, it was all business, as if a night together was a conversation with a handler to be fulfilled. She left you on the floor in the upper room of the empty inn at Pieta, her phantom touch all over you, and lip-shaped smudges of saliva all over your collarbone. She said she enjoyed herself, told you to come again. Twelve hours later, two separate halves of her body laid buried in the snow. Her lips had turned blue. You’ve never recovered from seeing her lying there.

* * *

 

 **32.**  
Tabitha brought you down to the river on a wintry night. She threaded her hand through yours as the two of you traversed the floodplain in the dark. Moving ice groaned underneath. The gnawed boat of a crescent moon rocked in the clouds above.

She knew where to place her hands, where to touch you to get a reaction. Every time you appeared to pause her hand would dart to your crotch, and everything began again. You shift and twirl, mount and fall, before finally clasping the sweaty knobs of her spine like picking stones from water.

* * *

 

 **33.**  
You wonder what the others call it. Do they talk about making love like the humans do? Or do they call it what it is: the licking, jamming, fucking, the bodies of two lonely warriors mashing together in the dark?

* * *

 

 **34.**  
Before Isley’s army stormed Pieta, you found Flora in the snowed-in graveyard in the town. She brushed snow from your knee as the two of you sat on adjacent tombstones. A pair of stopping stone angels cast a long thin shadow across the graves. A tendril of warmth wound up your arm where your hands touched. Then Flora slipped a strand of hair behind her ear and kissed you.

There and then, you believed in paradise, and in all the insane human ideals that a warrior’s lifestyle had kept from you. All those grand thoughts of love, devoted spouses, lives untouched by war.

But she pulled back. You recalled her lips, pink and still parted, her eyes still half-closed. Her hair clouded your nose.

She said, “I can’t do this. Not now.”

She said, “I’m sorry.”

* * *

 

 **35.**  
But you see the Ghosts and you believe things will change. Rules and ideas will change as people change, as warriors fight them and fight the Organisation. You lost hope at Pieta. But you see Miria and Tabitha holding hands and you dare to think of their future. You want to hope that maybe something - something that’s not really love - can still win.

* * *

 

 **36.**  
When all movements have stopped, you lie under the blanket with Yuma. Her grip eases, falls away. Back to back, the faintest of contact chafes against your skin. Your hand is caught in her long tresses. You look beyond her head and into the dark, straining your ears to hear her breathing. You can’t hear anything. This time, the silence absorbs everything. Everything else disappears into the black hole of memory.

* * *

 

 **37.**  
In the dark, you locate Yuma’s hand. She squeezes back. Now, you believe, everything will be fine.

 

_End_

**Author's Note:**

> The style of this fic is based off the Susan Minot's short story 'Lust'. I read that story a long time ago, and only in the last few years tried imitating it. 
> 
> This story went through several torturous revisions before being finalised. It was first posted as 'Bodies we keep' on my old Tumblr, and later as 'The end of everyone's names' on Mangahelpers. Thanks to all from Tumblr and MH who provided me feedback.
> 
> I hesitated in putting this up, because previous reviewers seemed to focus exclusively on the sex. So I've edited out the more obvious references, and made things sound much more implied. I have no intention to sexualise a character or characters. But rather I tried to focus on what I thought would be the fleeting romances among warriors who never knew when they would die, and how love can be both ephemeral, sacrificial and long-lasting.
> 
> Comments and critique welcome.


End file.
